The first one is for everyone, the second one just for GNOME-rs…
- 37 Signals on why allowing fear to irrationally infect your thinking and planning is terrible. Really good article. I’m trying to be less fearful and more optimistic myself, so this was powerful stuff to me.
- Nigel Tao has an interesting mockup up, based on throwing away basically all of the desktop except a web browser. On the one hand, a good example of how to think outside the box and how to make the browser more friendly to web apps (it throws away most browser chrome, for example); on the other hand, as he points out, you still need to play local music and handle local peripherals like cameras. So we likely can’t go all-web, all-the-time, quit yet.
I spend an hour and a half every working day on a train, with no internet access. I do occasional study sessions at the local library where access, other than through library terminals (that lack of access, by the way, is a major reason I go there to study).
But it means a substantial portion of my computer using time is offline, by necessity or by choice. Any workflow design that compromises on offline work in order to promote online stuff is doomed for me. As a user I really, really don’t care how wonderful my worklife is when online if my ability to get things done is compromised at exactly those times where I can be the most productive.
Any online component must be an “extra”, something that improves on the base offline experience without ever restricting it.
And if you can indirectly improve on the offline work through online functionality, so much the better. We already have deferred email sending, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How about the browser keeping track of what fairly static pages I tend to go to often, and make a special effort to cache those semipermanently (and perhaps documents one link away) so that I can check them up when offline too?
Hm, it’s interesting that where you see an inspirational article I see a handwaving attempt to explain that it doesn’t matter that Ruby is slow because anyone who uses it will never make anything popular anyway. Rather an odd way to sell the platform. I guess at 22 I count as an old man already but I think I’ll mutter bah-humbug and go back to c++ :)